a) I know what it's like to get nasty, vicious misogynous hate tweets from creepy males on the Internet -- most women bloggers do -- there's a sample of just one of thousands, by the creepy hacker Weev (@rabite). I don't have a problem with calling out and condemning this kind of behaviour, but I don't think it's merely a feminist problem; I see it as an anarcho-hacker culture antithetical to human rights and civil society in general for all of us, women, men and children.

b) Sarah Kendzior has a long history, in different settings, of causing provocations, stirring up raging controversies, and then when anyone debates her dubious theses and shifting premises, pretends they are guilty of incivility, harassment, sexism -- and as you can see, even imagining she needs to "call the police" (!) etc. Read my blog Different Stans to get an idea.

c) When I see her latest provocation based on rape threats, I keep this history in mind, although of course I condemn any such threat delivered against any women online. That's not the issue here -- but by once again creating a cocoon of sensitivity taboo and political correctness around a topic, counting on the fact that most gawkers at her provocation don't know her history, Sarah has obscured her active measure and promoted once again a peculiar, oppressive, non-documentary and arbitrary way of addressing the wrongs of the Internet.

Needless to say, I've never made any threat against Sarah Kendzior whatsoever -- it's preposterous. As the record shows, all I've done is...criticize her academic articles or blog posts. It's wild. I've never written her any emails and my tweets or blogs criticizing her don't contain anything remotely resembling a threat. Yet she herself complained about my legitimate criticism of her to my boss at a job to try to create an atmosphere of intimidation for me -- creepy!

Does that mean maybe her claims about these rape threats are fake as well? Oh, they may be very real, but it's her manipulation of this situation that should be examined here as it follows a historical pattern.

Trigger warning: no actual rape occurred, and the rape threats that occurred didn't occur from any of these parties but some other (invisible) parties, but people disagree what it all means. Basically, in the course of trying to knock the use of the term "bro" about certain figures that deserved a critique (or conversely, worship, I'm not sure, given that it's Piketty they're talking about as the "bronominist"), the link was made to Sarah Kendzior's tweet about rape threats from a "brocialist," and the Jacobin article seemed to fit that usage of "bro" as one of the cases of trivializing serious things.

Well, you might say no good deed goes unpunished, but it was an odd thing to do to accuse the target of the rape threats of doing something trivializing about her own rape threats to make a point only about "bro" linguistics -- not to get too meta about all this. But then, it's Jacobin. And that's just it. All of these people are sectarian weirdos.

Hence, Sarah's active measure around vilifying the left's various sorry manifestations. Whatever their sins, like good little PC children in the fierce re-education camp that is Twitter, they've deleted their Tweets and links and have written ardent apologies and thoughtful recantations. So that's all good, except, Sarah is now on a rampage and wants blood -- both she and her sidekick Joshua Foust falsely accused Jacobin editors and writers of issuing rape threats against her -- something that even all the sectarian leftists parsing this had to denounce as mendacious because they had done no such thing. But here's the thing:

Sarah Kendzior's purpose in life is to disrupt social movements, to pick out sectarian topics that she can use to pit people against each other, and to promote a "line" that can be shifting, but which generally tends to a) favour authoritarian Eastern governments and oppose Western governments b) favour ideological premises over rights and the rule of law c) favour networks of approved cadres over principles.

In her career on the Central Asian scene:

o She became famous for standing up to a widely-respected but pro-regime professor in the Central Asian studies field by chronicling the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan, but in the process, both minimalized violent Islamism and created a cover for many more reports later that in fact challenged dissenters or questioned the role of opposition movements (instead of challenging the regimes themselves) and favoured the status quo;

On another front, related to her obsession with unpaid internships, she:

o bullied, harassed and vilified a nonprofit organization working at the UN on violence against women, publishing falsehoods, displaying ignorance about how the NGO system works at the UN, and peddling a sectarian line supposedly about worker's rights, but really much more about naming and shaming her academic colleagues and peers.

Notice a pattern here?

Each one of these stories involve women's rights or human rights in some form or another, but yet in each instance, Sarah uncannily finds something politically incorrect about the women involved, and diguises her own assault on them as some sort of mission on behalf of higher principles of feminism -- even though concepts like women's rights aren't really what she supports -- what she supports is bureaucratic, authoritarian little cabals of only certain women and men bullying others and arrogating to themselves the power to decide what is "right". You know, Bolshevism.

When I saw her consistently backing up and excusing and running interference for the men at the Registan collective (she was the only woman), I called her the "office wife" because that's exactly how she behaved -- without any respect for women's rights and basic due process and decency and without any solidarity. That got me called "sexist" by her partner in crime (and protector in this current dispute, as in past disputes), the former DoD contractor Joshua Foust -- although the original problem with sexism started with her inability to stand up to bullying men -- and men writing awful stuff about women in the field and in general treating others terribly and taking utterly cynical positions on behalf of programs like drones.

It's odd -- and it doesn't make sense until you see it happen enough times over and over, and you realize that she is either a patholitical Internet persona engrossed in some sort of version of Internet hystrionics syndrome -- or working on behalf of some cadre movement or some other sinister power (she writes for Al Jazeera, a state news service of Qatar, which for me is not journalism but propaganda). When you see this pattern happen enough times, over enough years, with ever more publicized results and divided people, you realize there's something "up". Investigation is indeed required.

The three things she has done wrong on this particulate episode with the "rape threats," in my view, although your mileage may vary, is as follows:

1) She has treated the threats and the links to the threats or the casual attitudes toward the threats by Jacobin and Salon writers as somehow specific to these individuals and their superiors at their publications, but not to the leftist Marxist/socialist/radical ideologies they represent.

Imagine, being involved in any incident with something called "Jacobin magazine," and never pointing out that this is a radical movement celebrating Jacobinism, that is, overthrowing the state, and along the way, killing off class enemies with the guillotine. And whatever Salon's liberal genesis, is it now home for many Occupy-style radical ideologues like Natasha Leonard, and the real issue here isn't just their casual response to violence speech or acts against women, but their entire violent revolutionary ideologies that make the end justify the means, and the means coercive and destructive. (In a separate post, I will explain how the extreme, sectarian left ultimately diminishes rape by making it a mere subset of the problem of capitalism.)

This neglect of the deeper problems of the "movement" to single out only some aspect is what she does with the problem of women in tech -- it's about feminism, and not about hacker culture -- which she wants to preserve for its usefulness in breaking up bourgeois Western states, especially America.

2. She has implicitly denigrated the act of reporting on and publicly documenting one's rape threats or any kind of mistreatment as some kind of "privacy" act that is to be discouraged -- but which she herself is to be allowed "this one time" -- and then, of course, only partially. There's a lot of mystery surrounding the whole thing.

In her manipulative blog post, she lays out those parameters -- (the sectarian Firedog Lake was her Greek chorus in this regard) -- we must never demand that she publicize her e-mails or document her threats because to do so would be to indulge in "rape culture; worse, if anyone else decides to use the route of documentation and publicity, they must be attention whores -- because she's taking the high road by "never" talking about her personal life (the way the woman did who wrote that she was like "Adam Lanza's mother" -- who was first burnt at the Internet stake then sent to re-education school.)

Further, we are treated to the dubious thesis that "to talk about rape threats is to make them happen again or make more happen therefore we must never talk about them or link to them" -- a position that puts us not into feminist empowerment but submissive cultdom or frightened omerta.

This position is very much similar to her odd thesis in Central Asia studies journals that people who talked about the gross human rights violations and oppression of the regimes of Central Asia or the Caucasus were "scaring off" more ordinary Internet users and "ruining it for all of us" and thereby preventing a more moderate and incremental Internet space to be created. Fortuntately, activists in the region paid not the slightest attention to her.

3. She has favoured suppression of free speech over the old principle of displacing bad speech with good speech, thus joining the ranks of the PC and those who seek brow-beating and self-criticism circles on the open Internet, "trigger warnings" and removal of speech or forced apologies or shunning (in this she is just like her dear friend Jillian York who, counter-intuitively, is a program director at the Internet freedom organization Electronic Frontier Foundation.)

I had never heard of some of the newer feminists Kendzior has allied with or conversely attacked, although of course I know of Katha Pollitt and have gone to hear her speak in New York on a number of occasions and read her in the Nation.

Few women who read Mikka Kendall have actually laid in critical condition, bleeding on the operating table with a fetus with placenta abruption. I have. So I can look her dead in the eye and say I'm sorry for your terrible experience, I've had it, too, but here's the thing -- pregnancies at the stage of late-term abortion/premature birth are very hard to manage, but in our country with advanced medicine they usually don't end with the death of the mother, and all but a handful of Catholic hospitals (which make up 12% of all hospitals in the US) are not going to have second thoughts about abortions at this stage (if they really can establish it is 20-22 weeks). (I was offered an abortion, although also only after hours of painful waiting, but opted to have a very premature baby and have her treated in the NICU. She died a month later.) So I'd like to hear some more eyewitnesses to this story.

I usually don't favour Pollitt's own sectarian old-style socialist politics that have trouble finding fault with violent Islamist movements dominated by men and her embracing of the atrocious Anonymous provocation around the rape of the student in Steubenville.

I think what Sarah is doing now is a lot like the Anonymous disruption in Steubenville, which actually led to further vilification and shaming of the rape victim, the exposure of her name, the unjust persecution of innocent people, and obstruction of justice by making it difficult to gather testimony and get court witnesses.

Nothing that Anonymous was doing there was really about stopping rape culture -- a rape culture they themselves embraced before, during and after Steubenville in some of their outrageous statements on women, including against me, as a blogger covering their antics.

Rather, it was about disrupting the justice system as an institution of society and helping to break up society so that anarchy could prevail. There is some evidence that forces like Al Qaeda and foreign governments like Russia infiltrate and manipulate these hacker movements (the Snowden hack is only one very big and obvious example), and this is how they succeed -- while appearing to be an ordinary protest movement of the sort that has had legitimacy in American society.

What is the end result of what Sarah Kendzior is doing with this latest outrageous caper of hers? Is it really about pushing back against the outrageous behaviour of especially male techies and hackers online against women, and trying to create a safe space for women to excel? Not really, because that's not the result. The result is:

o splitting an already divided left even further -- although to be clear, the problems of the left's cohesion is not my problem and they will be doomed to division as long as they embrace radical and even violent ideologies over the rule of law;

o establishing only certain online figures as authorities on how to interpret the issue, and quashing dissent and the due process of publications and debates;

o discouraging the documentation and publication of human rights abuses, including online threats, under the guise of "privacy", and refusing to submit to due process and the rule of law to address the issue of violence against women; instead of building institutions, enabling networks to run roughshod over others who step out of line.

Trust me, the problem of violence against women, which is very big on the Internet even if it is cyberspace and injuries are psychic and not physical, does not get solved by creating a cabal of a few bullying, coercive females to rule the roost and discourage not only dissent, but calls on themselves to be accountable.

It's like the problem of misogynist men in tech is definitely not solved by having Anil Danish threaten, bully and get fired a coder who happened to make a tasteless rape joke on Twitter -- and then vow to run him out of the field all together. No women were raised up by Dash's Bolshevik tactics, and we don't want to live in a society where people like Dash, using those methods, prevail by force over others using positions of publicity and power.

The problem of hatred and misogyny is not solved by discouraging documentation and publication and thwarting the steady building up of movements of rights and solidarity. These methods sound old-fashioned in a world where we are supposed to achieve justice by getting links removed or tweets deleted or people blocked or banned. They only recur because those digital solutions do not change or curb human behaviour.

“The companies, some more than others, are taking steps to make sure
that surveillance without their consent is difficult,” said Christopher
Soghoian, a senior analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “But
what they can’t do is design services that truly keep the government out
because of their ad-supported business model, and they’re not willing
to give up that business model.”

Soghoian is a former Soros fellow and now at the ACLU, he's the most quoted "progressive" "privacy expert" in all these stories, and only represents one school of thought -- absolute encryption for the hackers, maximum transparency for the government. Oh, and hatred of capitalism -- as you can see from the sneer at the business model.

Oh, I complain about this business model, too, but it exists not because of techno-libertarians and techno-neo-liberalism of the sort Evgeny Morozov loathes. It exists because of technocommunism, and the unwillingness of people like Soghoian to couple private property and privacy -- and indeed the entire hackers' support movement spawned by John Perry Barlow and Electronic Frontier Foundation, which mainly disavows intellectual property and commerce online.

The other source is:

A tech industry executive who spoke only on the condition of anonymity
because of the sensitivities around the surveillance, said, “Just based
on the revelations yesterday, it’s outright theft,” adding, “These are
discussions the tech companies are not even aware of, and we find out
from a newspaper.”

Oh, and there's this PR flog:

Even before June, Google executives worried about infiltration of their networks. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday
that the N.S.A. was tapping into the links between data centers, the
beating heart of tech companies housing user information, confirming
that their suspicions were not just paranoia.

In response, David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, issued a
statement that went further than any tech company had publicly gone in
condemning government spying. “We have long been concerned about the
possibility of this kind of snooping,” he said. “We are outraged at the
lengths to which the government seems to have gone.”

That doesn't count. (Because it's just transcribing a press release, not really scouting out real Googlers to get the story.)

The reality is, Google started hiding key word information long before Snowden. I've been noticing for ages that on my blog's list of the referring addresses, there is only "google.com" and no key words when you hover over the URL -- there's only the blog's URL itself. It used to be that I could tell that when somebody typed "Jacob Appelbaum" and "unaccountable" -- that's what brought them to my blog -- many of my hits were precisely from that combination and I presume still are because those stories are among the most popular on this site. But like other bloggers, I can't tell what the key words are anymore. I don't care, because I can more or less figure the subject matter, and I'm uninterested in tying any writing to what those key words are, I write simply what concerns me at the time.

But there is a whole science of search-engine optimization where people try to divine what those key word searches mean, and then fashion blog posts to fit them and get more traffic. These are empty calories to me. I know if I post to Reddit there will be gadzillion hits. And certain subjects get huge hits. But those aren't people to talk to and think along with -- they are drive-bys, gawkers, and they don't interact on Twitter or leave comments. What's the point? Even so, I think Google shouldn't have hidden those key words. I can't possibly see how this relates to privacy because when we saw those referring addresses and words, we didn't see WHO was making those searches. Some URL addresses will refer back to some specific blogger or news article that linked you, but Google searches don't show you anything but the country of search. Why can't they show those words? Isn't more information better?

Perhaps the mechanics of it are that when people's search terms become known even in aggregate or even disconnected to their identity, there's still some kind of leakage that eventually does trace back to them -- well, at least Google knows! And it's not as if Google is stopping itself from knowing this!

There can only be one reason really behind this, and that's the desire of Google to sell this information that before came free. So if I want to be an SEO guru, I have to pay. Little blogs like mine then wouldn't pay, but some giant site with lots of traffic would, as they would for the ads themselves. I feel Google is lying about this, and using Snowden as a cover. Maybe they had to invent Snowden...

Seriously..There's this entirely false impression that Google is "angry" or "has spoken out repeatedly" -- but that's not true. They aren't. The Washington Post reported that two Google engineers contacted informally by a reporter swore when they saw a drawing of the NSA stripping away the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) of their server traffic. But that's not Google being angry. I asked a Google engineer what was up and got...silence (that's Brian Fitzpatrick, no relation, on G+, who posted the Washington Post story without comment -- he's someone who works on the soi-disant "transparency report".) Shouldn't the real response be laughter? Because the real question is "how". The little smiley face doesn't say.

Trust me, when Google is mad, it can do a lot more than amount to a couple of swearing engineers. When it wants to, it knocks laws out of Congress completely -- like SOPA, and CISPA. With a single post on its big front page under "take action," it can produce 7 million petition-signers and more. Google has paid for a lot of Congressional campaigns.

Recent disclosures regarding surveillance activity raise important concerns both in the UnitedStates and abroad. The volume and complexity of the information that has been disclosed inrecent months has created significant confusion here and around the world, making it moredifficult to identify appropriatepolicy prescriptions.

Before you snooze, ask yourself...does this sound like an angry letter to you?

This sounds like a fluffy kitty cat. Not even a Grumpy Cat.

Google et. al. are asking for...something they already do:

Our companies have consistently madeclear that we only respond to legal demands for customer and userinformation that are targeted and specific. Allowing companies to be transparent about the number and nature of requests will help the public better understand the facts about the government’s authority to compel technology companies to disclose user data and how technology companies respond to the targeted legal demands we receive.

I mean, this sounds like one of those big magazine ads or video ads on the side of a web page that blink and have smart looking people giving earnest-sounding talks:

We look forward to working with you, the co-sponsors of your bills, and other members on legislation that takes into account the need of governments to keep individuals around the worlds afe as well as the legitimate privacy interests of our users around the world.

You almost get the feeling that journalists WISH Google were more mad, and is trying to desperately hype the little it has to make it come true.

See, what's happening is that lobbying groups are speaking as if they are the tech industry and are getting mad on their behalf, but they are REALLY unconvincing because we know what the big dogs can do when they are really mad -- or even just see an opportunity, and that's NOT happening. Here's the usual suspect barking:

“The NSA has finally done something so egregious that the U.S. Internet
industry can do nothing but respond with demands for reform of the law
to protect their systems and their users,” said Kevin Bankston, who’s
helped spearhead the Valley’s message to D.C. while at the Center for
Democracy and Technology and is now headed to the New America
Foundation.

Well, yeah, where else.

Supposedly, the tech titans should be worried because Snowden is hurting business. Supposedly. But I never hear any real tech people actually saying this (like Robert Scoble, whose company, Rackspace, endorsed the Stop Watching Us fizzled demonstrations last weekend).

The disclosure of U.S. spying on
allies may temporarily undercut efforts by American companies to
sell technology overseas, according to a former official with
the Department of Homeland Security.

“We are going to go through a period of substantial
skepticism abroad about any technology we’re selling people,”
Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who headed the department’s
policy directorate, said today at a forum on cybersecurity
hosted by Bloomberg Government and Symantec Corp. (SYMC)

Then there's Gen. Alexander:

Alexander said government must work with private industry
to find ways to improve cybersecurity. President Barack Obama
met with chief executives of consumer, utility and defense
companies yesterday to discuss proposed voluntary security
standards for computer networks.

But you know, we had this in CISPA, and the geek goons inside and outside of government lobbied the president to veto CISPA -- and he did. In fact, I always argue that they should have passed CISPA which would have put those dinner relations under the rule of law.

Look, guys. Who forced the click-ad model on us? Tim Berners-Lee and his architecture choices. That Internet he made which is anti-privacy (to be "collaborative") and resists intellectual property and commerce online as counter to such collaboration. He did not want the commodification of information or knowledge -- which means any form of code to these people - and here we are all with digital goods having a tough time getting paid.

Still, the human marketplace routes around the Cathedral -- to borrow a set of metaphors that the open source cult wanted to be about something else entirely LOL. So a lot of buying and selling does get done on the Internet.

I'd like to think we will move out of the click age, and DRM in HTML5 is maybe one sign of that, but there will have to be a complete rethinking. Or rather, a concerted battle because it is a war -- and it means a war against Bruce Schneier.

Basically, Google already encrypts stuff on their servers, but if this is true, then the NSA just got at the pipes between where vast amounts of data is routed. So, it's like the way Turkmen shepherds who are dirt poor in gas-rich Turkmenistan poke holes in pipelines to get some for free because only a certain amount is rationed by the state.

There's a lot of this story we are just not getting and what is being passed off as barking is not that at all. Stay tuned to the next post.

"I
can categorically state that nothing resembling the mass surveillance
of individuals by governments within our systems has ever crossed my
plate.

If it had, even if I couldn't talk about it, in all likelihood I would no longer be working at Google.

Whatever
the NSA was doing involving the mass harvesting of information, it did
not involve being on the inside of Google. And I, personally, am by now
disgusted with their conduct: the national security apparatus has
convinced itself and the rest of the government that the only way it can
do its job is to know everything about everyone. That's not how you
protect a country. We didn't fight the Cold War just so we could rebuild
the Stasi ourselves." -- +Yonatan Zunger

My comment:

+Nuno Maia
Thanks. But then the question is, if he didn't see anything like that,
why is he disgusted with a government that wasn't doing that, as far as
he knows? See, that's what's so weird about all this. Either he's right
and the government didn't do this, in which case he should join the
effort to expose Greenwald and Snowden as manipulating perceptions for
their own agenda. Or he should find proof of what he know believes the
government is doing. But he's trying to have it both ways.

10/27/2013

Live stream web page for stopwatchingus shows a wan social media uptake.

I think we can safely conclude that the Stop Watching Us rally in Washington, DC Saturday was a flop. Says Reuters:

Estimates varied on the size of the march, with organizers saying more than 2,000 attended. U.S. Capitol Police said they do not typically provide estimates on the size of demonstrations.

AFP was a little more generous, reporting 4,500, but then, they think their president is bugged by the NSA, and they tilt left. Even so, the numbers as paltry.

Good!

One participant tweeted enthusiastically that there were already 1,000 people there even before the buses arrived -- oops, that means not that many people showed up for the buses from New York, and even a few followers told him this was a poor turn-out.

So they want us to stop watching us, maybe we shouldn't. Or maybe the Congress in particular needs to stop thinking these people represent some big force or constituency -- they don't. They have social media amplification but it's not really all that much.

9030 retweets of a livestream web page -- the main one for the event -- is a shockingly low number for something that was hyped for weeks and had all kinds of big name adversarial journalists and leftist icons and companies like Ben & Jerries pumping it - and the Libertarians as well. G+ is once again revealed to be a geek ghetto with just 1787 hits -- and there, we have to figure something else is at stake here: the great iPhone jail-breaking geek masses (1.7 million) did not rise as one to this anti-NSA cause. Maybe because too many of them work for government and related corporations and want to keep their jobs? Or maybe because they aren't convinced there's such a spy problem here and it doesn't matter?

27,000 Facebook likes is better, but still pretty small beer, given that these Facebook groups have been active since June (liberals and lefties still use FB more than other services, which must drive some of the more PC anarchists crazy).

In fact, Restore the 4th, one of many such groups with this name in different cities on FB, as one sharp-eyed twitterer named Geranimo noted, was founded on June 8th, seemingly before the Snowden affair broke into the news. Actually, Glenn Greenwald's first article based on this leak was June 6, but it wasn't until June 9 that Snowden burst into the news by revealing his identity in Hong Kong in the videotaped nterview made by Laura Poitras. Suspicious?

Well, it's one more data point that needs study, but I think the explanation is simply that the people doing Restore the 4th are the same old cadres who have been at this radical transparency/absolute encryption game for a decade -- also attacking copyright and cybersecurity -- except when they run it. That's Electronic Frontier Foundation and their related front groups like Fight for the Future, Demand Progress -- all front groups that all trace back to the same activists and donors. If they are claiming to be "grassroots" now and representing some kind of authentic public backlash over Snowden, there's the evidence that they are not:

There were signs of trouble one could see before hand, like the fact that the chair of the Restore the Fourth chair Ben Doernberg had so few followers on Twitter (about 1500), and wasted his time battling critics like me instead of being persuasive to a larger circle. And that's a good thing, when hard leftists sink of their own sectarianism, I'm not complaining. As you can see, Ben also whined about a Reuters reporter saying there were "hundreds" and not "thousands":

Ben himself barely made a tweet all day, until he started in with the browbeating. That's how you know that things went wrong. People aren't going to tweet about low turnout. Try as they did to make all the shots close-up, to disguise the lack of people, we could all see the same puppets in each shot, and see that the turn out was extremely weak -- a few thousands. Even with the ACLU paying for the busses.

Still, there was a certain amount of negativity around this that cost support. Ben tried to disassociate himself from a sign that was reported on the news and on Twitter of someone carrying a sign with Obama as Hitler. Look, once they stoop that low and become that crazy, you know they can't get followers. Good! But as you can see, Ben argues that these coalitions were necessary. This is supposed to be "mature politics" unlike Occupy weirdness and freaky cultism. Except, it still comes out the same because it's just too transparently what it is: socialist agendas trying to pretend they are something else.

The good news is that Tom Watson now declared himself as a *social democrat* which is indeed a form of socialism, so that this denial that these progs are socialist can maybe begin to subside. Better that they be straight about it.

Reuters tags and descriptions on Yahoo -- not the headline -- spoke of "hundreds" and the "far left and far right" getting together. That's not what social media spinners like Ben want to see --- they use the word "progressive" so they can sound like "everybody" from Democrats to McCain Republicans.

I think that a key reason this demonstration didn't have more people is that neither Google or Jon Stewart or anything with any real mass power got behind it. If Reddit the company endorsed it, Redditors themselves didn't.

And there's another strange thing -- Glenn Greenwald only had one tweet about Rep. Russ Holt speaking ats the rally -- he didn't live tweet it or send it any greetings or boost it in any way. Other lefties like David Corn said nothing or weren't even on Twitter. Well, it's a Saturday, even the progs like to take a break with their families. Katrina vanden Heuvel also had only one re-tweet of RT.com the Russian Kremlin-supported TV station (what else) which live-blogged it all day - she had nothing to say, either. Look at all the other "stars" on the top billing and they also just had little to say. Maybe this was because of the Libertarian thing. Maybe because of poor turnout. Or maybe they don't actually care what happens on the ground.

And yet these were the people who, starting in the summer, threatened to turn every vote against Amash's initiative to defund the NSA into a "yes". Scary!

Come to think of it, Ron Wyden didn't seem to be speaking at this jamboree. Why? Too hard left/right even for him?

Was it just poorly organized or too riven with sectarian differences, or is it that in fact most Americans aren't on the hard left or hard right and just don't care?

I think there's a larger theme here which is 2016. Soros funds a lot of these groups that run "Stop Watching Us" -- millions of his budget go to national security issue nonprofits (which means making there be less of national security in the name of "open society" -- which is what I have come to see merely means the solid "progressive" line, not real openness and pluralism). But Soros is now looking ahead to Hillary in 2016. She is not as hard left as Obama -- she is not anti-business as he is, with his socialist "community organizing" training and Chicago lefty circles. And surely the Soros operatives know something maybe not so apparent --there is a huge backlash against Obama. Over so many things. Benghazi -- even the now-dismissed prog @natsecwonk questioned the narrative with his insider's knowledge -- the weird Syria whiplash, and of course the NSA and Rosen and Risen. All of it. That backlash might translate into a conservative or libertarian candidate that could prove wildly popular. Indeed, the EFF isn't stupid, either, and is building those political bridges now.

The Democrats won't be able to win again by moving to the left -- they've gone too far and are starting to meet the hard right coming round the corner. So to appeal to demographics within the Party and disenchanted GOP members, they will tack more toward the center. That's what I'm guessing. I'm not an expert on national politics though, just commenting.

I do hope we are seeing the Snowden movement fizzle out, just as we saw Occupy fizzle out. That's good news. Our country has a lot of damage to repair.

Of course, even if these people only turn out a few thousand, I still think it's worth tracking and opposing them because they are antithetical to human rights and think that ends justify means (like forming coalitions with some pretty creepy people). What I do hope is that Congress does not feel whiplashed by them and doesn't cater to them or accommodate them and realizes that Wyden from Portlandia isn't the nation.

P.S. I forgot to mention that Edward Snowden (or some facsimile) piped in a stilted message to the rally. It was yet another strangely-written piece that didn't sound like the guy we used to read on Ars Technica.

10/24/2013

A screenshot of a powerpoint slide by Fumi Yamazaki from a presentation on child issues and the Internet at the IGF

I've been too busy with other things to check in on the Internet Governance Forum in Bali (where else). The IGF is essentially the ITU all over again in disguise (few every seem to realize that its a subsidiary body of the ITU, mandated by the UN Secretary General to "carry out" the agenda of the World Information Society Summit -- which was state controlled). As you might well imagine, the IGF is the usual cabal of Soros-funded NGOs, Big IT lobbyists, bad governments also in disguise in the form of GONGOs (government-organized NGOs) and other assorted international jet-setter cadres who aspire to rule the Internet just as much as the ITU. The ITU is a known bad quantity anyone can agree on as bad for the Internet because it has Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia etc there with a vote as states.

The IGF purports to be "better" because it represents that other fuzzy bullshit thing called "the multi-stakeholders" which -- as I just indicated above -- is really just a cover for Soros-funded NGOs, Big IT corporate interests (Google is all over it), etc. etc. to do the same bad things that the bad countries do, which is take over.

In addition to opposing almost exclusively what the US government does, the IGF NGOs like the "progressive engineers" have a hard time conceding corporate and commercial interests in general as valid on the Internet -- and of course the Googles of the world at these things try to cover this up with reputational laundering, as they are doing right now by rolling out various do-gooder helper things like Uproxy

(More on that later, not surprisingly, Libtech is going wild over this because it's not Tor -- my quick take on this, even given my suspiciousness of all things Google, is that it's great if Tor now has a real competitor by real smart people who are in a corporation that likely won't tolerate crime the way Tor has -- but let's see. No circumvention/encryption tool is safe from hostile governments or even good governments, nor should it immune to legitimate law-enforcement. Hopefully Google will do better than Tor on this but neither is an honest broker).

I'm afraid to look at what's going on there now because if I do, days will go by while I fume -- I got into a Twit-fight with Jillian York, which dragged in even comments from her pal Jacob Appelbaum (!) and I assume she's there, in spirit if not in body. More on that later if I have time to Storify or just look in my timeline, it's hilarious.

But since I can't cover this now, I give you Nitin Pai. God bless Nitin Pai. I always like his tweets. I have no idea of his back story. Perhaps he's some technolibertarian or conservative or Hindu nationalist or who knows what but he seems fine. And here's what he says -- which indeed, is the right thing for Indians to be saying if they want to keep on coming to the US -- and have a US to come to! -- that can help their best and brightest thrive and eventually help their country (always a debate with brain-drain, but let's have it.)

As Pai says:

New Delhi, with its habit of going with the flow of international
multilateralism, is willy-nilly throwing its lot with China, Russia,
Brazil and others that are leading the charge against the US for their
own reasons. This enthusiasm is fashionable and popular with activists,
but misplaced in the context of our national interests.

Both principle and realpolitik suggest that India is better off with continued US preponderance in internet governance.

The US Constitution, political system, civil society and media
are better guardians of online free speech and privacy than some UN
outfit. Yes, the US is massively spying on us, but it also produces the
Mannings, Snowdens and Greenwalds that rightly or wrongly, but
fearlessly, tell us what is happening. In a way, the rest of the world
vicariously benefits from the US' commitment to liberty.

Amen.

I would add that it's not just that India "goes with the flow" -- they were recruited by the Soviet Union back in the day, and never really left the Kremlin ambit.

Now, I'm for leaving the Internet alone. It's actually pretty healthy, running with not the multi-stake holder approach, which is fake, but the free market and the free flow of ideas, goods, and services, such as they are. The Internet more or less is free in the US and actually much ohf the world, despite all the craziness you read about surveillance and chills on speech in the US -- they don't exist as you can tell by reading Glenn Greenwald leaking Snowden every day. Hello! And the Internet gets better every day even in places like Turkmenistan or Iran.

Yes, the Internet is in trouble in places like Russia or China or Iran. But some of these countries also produce capitalist corporations -- even if crony/oligarch capitalism -- that represent a challenge to Google and that's a good thing. On the Russian Internet, I can click on a button and tip a blogger (if I have a Russian electronic wallet attached to a Russian bank). I can easily do things like donate to political prisoners or Navalny with that wallet. Why can't I do that in America?! These countries' citizens would rather have their own services in their own languages and culture even if they still want access to Facebook or Twitter as a supplement given state controls, so it's all good. The Internet freedom gang should spend less time fussing about the US spying on Merkel and work on freeing up the Internet for the people behind the electronic Iron Curtain.

Does leaving the Internet free meaning it has US dominance? Yes and no, as I've just pointed out, and I'm also not persuaded, as Pai obviously isn't, that this is a bad thing.

I wonder how much the standards bodies like IEEE and IETF now fussing about US dominance really matter. These entities get packed with "progressives" and outright technocommunists including from the US Department of Defense who are happy to suppress commerce, intellectual property -- its bastion -- and insist on copyleftistism. But hey, they lost on the struggle over DRM and HTML5. Good! that is a little sung progress story that I wondered whether would be lost with the likes of Cory Doctorow beavering away against it constantly. But it prevailed. Because business requires it. Good!

Eventually I will go take a peek at the damage of the IGF meeting -- but ultimately, it doesn't matter, in the words of Loren Feldman. The Internet routes around...

This development is a bad thing all of its own, and is at the center of many other bad things -- I wish I had time to cover it all -- for now, I'll just flag it.

Milton Mueller is a very thoughtful and smart man about the Internet, but I've debated him a number of times because he tends to that collectivist, anti-US attitude that all the Internet freedom fighters seem to adopt in order to obtain "independence."

Yes, surprise, surprise, all those alphabet bodies with the humming engineers are now going to flee the US. And...end up right in the arms of Russia, like Edward Snowden, you know, in the end?

He said "don't tell me I didn't warn you" and has all kinds of smart arguments and I get it. But...as I pointed out, these agencies were never so independent anyway with their special interests (US military in the virtual worlds section of IETF, anybody?!) I can guarantee you that even with seething hate and fear of the USG among these organizations, the US military will cling like a bath-house birch leaf to the virtual worlds section and we won't see them go...

People blather about conspiracy in the comments, and I say:

“Conspired” is exactly the word to use here.

And these non-governmental agencies that you claim were in the pocket
of the US never really were under US control but under control of
factions anyway. Would that they *were* under control so they could have
some hope of remaining liberal and democratic and transparent. indeed,
given that the major Big IT companies are US based, like Google, it
would make sense.

But no, you anarchists had to push for the fake “multi-stakeholder”
model which is utter baloney because only some holders get to stake, the
rest are fictions.

And you’ll see how this lovely third-world veneer of the lovely
Brazilian president is just a cover for Russian and/or Chinese takeover.
Enjoy.

To which I get one of those typical perfectly idiotic Latin American leftists ranting about evil Amerika -- these types were all over Occupy, BTW.

I’m Brazilian and I never heard of any foreign influence over
Brazilian government except from US. Can you clarify what do you mean
about your claim that we have bonds with Russia and China?

Do you know that your beloved US sponsored a Military Coup in Brazil
and was co-responsible for the death and torture of thousands of
innocent people during a 20 year dictatorship that ruined our country?

You Americans think you are better that the rest of the world. You
support your fascist State and want to own the whole planet, think your
laws apply to us and think you deserve more and better because you have
an economic system that you imposed to the rest of the world.

How can you sleep with the blood of só many millions of lives in your hands?

Have you heard of BRICS? Do you know they meet and coordinate?
Have you ever been to the UN and seen how Brazil behaves, how it votes,
how it backs Russia and China? Did you notice how your president just
snubbed the US? Of course you have bonds with China and Russia when it
comes to sticking it to the US. These don’t have to be some literal
blatant collusions, but they can be seen.

Yes, my country is beloved, and no, that doesn’t mean I endorse all
its coups or help of military juntas in Latin America. But hey, a lot of
those brutal coups and wars were caused by these governments reaction
and over-reaction to communism. How could you and your leftist movements
never understood the nature of the Soviet Union where the real millions
and millions were killed, eh? What kind of disreputable left did you
have there that could make common cause with those butchers? ! You made
it possible for oppressive right-wing governments to have an argument.
There was never any need for that. Cuba was never progressive and harmed
many, many people with its alliance with Moscow and the communist
ideal.

You leftists think you’re the most pure in the world, but truly, the
blood of tens of millions are on your hands because of those years when
you blindly ignored the reality of the Soviet Union and blindly ignored
the suffering of millions. Shame on you. How can you sleep at night?

International human rights laws are what apply to all of us. As for
economic systems, I don’t notice the enormous flow of immigrants from
South America to North America ever letting up – and that’s a good
thing, we’re a nation of immigrants. Meanwhile, you sulk, and you cannot
seem to make that better world your socialism promises. People are
right to flee it.

***

Read up on the coup and US involvement here. Needless to say, there aren't "millions killed," but the US played the usual unsavoury role backing right-wing governments against communists -- and I stand by my contention that the root of this problem here is Soviet communism, its infiltration of revolutionary movements in Latin America, and their refusal to make a politics separate from Soviet communism -- you know, like Edward Snowden also refused to do.

This is a hopeless argument to try to fight. It's the new Cold War, and people are taking their sides behind the barricades -- and let them.

I hope they are happy -- as I said -- when they end up in the arms of Russia. They may never know what hit them...

I know it becomes boring when I tell people that all of this was prefigured in Second Life years ago. Yes, truly. First, gadzillions of Brazilians joined Second Life. They love social media. They overran Orkut and Google closed it down for the rest of the world but let them have it...or something like that.

In SL, they opened fabulous islands with amazing nightclubs and talented car and clothing designers, but also some of them became known as the most elaborate and cunning scammers. I must say that some of the scammers I dealt with were so brazen, so bold, but so ingenious, that you had to appreciate them at some level... I think there are less of them than there were, but the funny thing is that during this Brazilian boom in SL, the president of the country appeared in SL at a panel -- some conference in Mexico about the Internet or something. I remember getting into strenuous debates there. This president was for copyleftism and Internet freedom all mangled together and I figured it would not end well...He was supposed to be very progressive for his time -- but I have to say, give me the president of Estonian instead, any day, he has his head on straight about copyright, cybersecurity, and what is really needed for a truly free Internet.

Guys, enjoy your Internet run from Brazil with Glenn Greenwald as advisor, truly... Interestingly, Freedom House rates Brazil's level of press freedom and Internet freedom as only "partly free."

10/03/2013

This is a great piece -- Please Do Feed the Trolls -- and a great step in fighting the hegemony of authoritarian geeks on the Internet.

I'm a big believer in fact of fighting back -- I call it pushing back. I push back, as everyone knows. Then people accuse me of being complicit in my own harassment. They say I should keep the silence of mafia-like omerta and never, ever talk about harassment by griefers, hackers, Anonymous, etc.-- that it "glorifies" them and they "feed on attention" and do it more to get glory.

Nonsense. You don't do that offline with terrorists and other criminals -- of course the news reports on their evil deeds. There are always debates about whether coverage "glorifies" them and there are several obsessives in the field who constantly claim that TV coverage is only manufacturing more mass shooters. I tend to think that a) access to guns b) violent video games c) narcotics d) autism spectrum are far more likely to be culprits than copy-cat impulses, but in any event, you will never get the free media to stop reporting on crime.

My beef with "uberfeminist" not surprisingly, however, is how she has converted this all into a "feminist" issue.

It's not, really, because the authoritarianism of male geeks is a threat to everyone, male and female and is a larger problem than can be fixed by just various PC solutions like "sensitivity training".

All you're doing by taking the "feminist" approach to the boorish nerd online is then creating a new set of problems which is the boorishness of speech minders.

There's quite the backlash now going on in the tech world about women in tech being harassed. I get it, truly I do; all you have to do is look at my vandalized Wikipedia entry to see the visible work of male geek trolls trying to silence my critical speech about tech and their bad behaviour by trying to ridicule me and print falsehoods about me.

But I don't see this as merely an issue of feminism. So far, I merely see that feminist sort of response as mirroring the authoritarianism of the geeks who spawned the nastiness in the first place. You get things like this:

o in the "dongle" story, some guys who made a tasteless joke between themselves are fired, and the crusading feminist tech gal who overheard them and made a huge ordeal out of it also gets fired and everyone in that narrow tech media sphere obsesses endlessly, trying to make "rules" to control spontaneous jokes and speech at conferences -- which is anti-science and anti-freedom;

o in the story of the CTO of Business Insider, "the Internet" (actually only that major-league douche Anil Dash and the irritable sectarian Jillian Yorke of EFF) got this guy fired -- truly appalling when his crime consisted also of a few off-colour jokes

o TechCrunch had to contort itself into a pretzel over yet another tasteless presentation by some app builders -- and those fellows got themselves banished from tech-land and VC land probably for life

Throughout all these manufactured ordeals, we've had to endure enormous net-nannying and rule-making that -- again -- is contrary to a free society, which of course means it is contrary to the innovation that tech supposedly needs to thrive on.

Now, I totally get it that when people make a hostile and threatening environment, they drive out OTHERS' free speech and then it isn't a free society.

But that's why I'm for fighting back hard -- and that requires the net-nannies and moderators and troll-suppressers themselves to stop and quit saying it's the fault of those who fight back. Nine times out of ten, when I have seen flamewars on forums or Twitter, it's because people are not allowed to fight it out. They are stopped by oppressive little mods who stack the deck against those they like, their friends, the in-crowd, the PC. With everyone able to press the "report abuse" button on these services, the fight can never be fair because some mod can enter it late in the last round and not realize who is truly to blame and ban the victim not the perpetrator.

The uberfeminist post degenerates into a lot of inside baseball from wars on Twitter that I didn't follow and have more to do with the agendas of feminists or atheists or whatever.

But I can't emphasize enough: the threat of bullies that these feminists are identifying as only misogyny simply has to go further in its analysis.

Otherwise it's like the Cat in the Hat in your house making messes -- you get the Business Insider CTO guy fired, but then humiliated and trounced and threatened by Anil Dash never to see another VC dollar in his life -- and that's just plain wrong. Because then you're left with Anil Dash. Who the hell is Anil Dash? He's a PC douche with an enormous ego and sense of righteousness and a thin skin and neuralgia about "progressive" topics that make him unsufferable. He actually made his fortune as a developer of this very blog platform. Bully for him! But that doesn't entitle him to go around being king of the world on other people.

Why should I have to trade the brogrammer's off-putting talk for Anil's bullying? I shouldn't. The punishment should fit the crime. Tweets are not a crime; they are merely speech. Getting up with an off-colour act in a conference shouldn't lead to job loss but merely an expression of disapproval. When the punishments are made so harsh, you just get more backlash, I suspect.

09/28/2013

NSA chief Gen. Alexander slams "sensational reporting" here -- and I couldn't agree more. Why aren't there more journalists questioning this narrative and doing more investigation of the principles involved in making the claims against the NSA?

Like Glenn Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler and others of these "progressive" or libertarian writers, he is in such a bubble of antagonism that he can never see any nuances or turn off the hate and snark machine. You never feel as if there is intelligence there on Tech Dirt, just reptilian cunning.

One of the favourite things of the snarky geeks to do is pretend that the government or some politician has done something "illegal" or "the same thing" as some figure like Snowden or Manning whom they are targeting or prosecuting -- as if to say, "See, they get away with it because they are privileged elites, but the hackers can't" blah blah.

Their absolute favourite is to try to witch-hunt and then call-out with malicious glee some political leader who seems to be violating secrecy while themselves complaining about hackers. Much of the time this is sheer ridicularity.

DID FEINSTEIN LEAK LIKE SNOWDEN? OF COURSE NOT

This story about Dianne Feinstein is so typical claiming she "accidently gave away" the story that NSA taps the Internet backbone. But scrape away all the geeky rant here and look at what the NSA even in its redacted form, wrote, as referenced in this story:

Back in August, when the FISA courtdeclassified its ruling about NSA violations, the third footnote, though heavily redacted, did briefly discuss this "upstream" capability:

The term "upstream collection" refers to NSA's interception of Internet communications as they transit [redacted] rather than to acquisitions directly from Internet service providers such as [redacted]

Upstream collection... occurs when NSA obtains internet communications, such as e-mails, from certain US companies that operate the Internet background, i.e., the companies that own and operate the domestic telecommunications lines over which internet traffic flows

So what's the big deal?

Either the NSA gets the communications from the companies "directly," i.e. they go to them and give a request to get it and deal with them directly although they don't get it by jacking directly into their servers or they get it from the backbone -- again from companies by going to them with requests.

BACKBONE IN BACKGROUND ISN'T SURFACED

Even if there is some notion here that the NSA is tapping directly into the backbone to get overseas Internet traffic -- and there isn't in actually that crude way -- you have to say: so what?

They are tapping in order to find certain things for which they have "probable cause" to put under surveillance between they are trying to monitor and stop terrorism and other crimes. Good!

There is no evidence that they take the entire firehose of the entire Internet into their hands and dredge it arbitrarily leading to actual civil rights violations. IF a machine does this and collects certain data, it's to a grid that fits a certain mandate that is in fact overseen by internal reviews and the FISA courts.

Naturally, there are the mandatory guffaws from the geeks because Feinstein said "backround" instead of "backbone". Since "Internet backbone" is not some special technical phrase but used widely, it's obvious she simply misspoke, but no, we have to turn it into a "teachable moment" when we insist that Congress is "too stupid" to legislate about technology (a notion I resolutely reject, as there are plenty of experts available and the principles of law involved are basic and not rocket science; usually what hackers mean when they say this is that this or that congress person isn't doing what they want or isn't like their famous extremist Ron Wydall.)

But I don't see that Feinstein is "leaking" anything or that in fact there is some smoking gun or some scandal. The NSA spies. Good, that's what it's supposed to do! It spies by dredging communications pipelines in some fashion to track terrorism, crime, etc. Good!

The challenge them to the civil liberties gang and hacker hysterics is to find actual concrete cases where the NSA somehow actually wrongfully put someone under surveillance for no good reason, or even gave information that got someone arrested unlawfully in the end. Bring it. Not seeing it.

WITTES PUSHES BACK

Fortunately, there's Benjamin Wittes of the Lawfare blog and Brookings Institution to push back on all this Greenwald and Masnick Snowden hysteria. He has produced many good articles challenging the hacker take on this with careful review of the legal principles and facts as they are known so far.

I have gone through the declassified documents very carefully, and
these disclosures to my mind show no evidence of any intentional spying
on Americans or abuse of civil liberties. They show a remarkably low
rate of the sort of errors that any complex system of technical
collection will inevitably produce. They show robust compliance
procedures—as DeLong’s quip in the aisle yesterday accurately reflects.
They show earnest and serious efforts to keep the Congress informed,
notwithstanding some members’ protestations that they were shocked to
learn that NSA—having repeatedly informed Congress that it was engaged
in bulk metadata collection—was actually telling the truth. And they
show a remarkable dialog with the FISC about the parameters of the
agency’s legal authority and a real commitment both to keeping the court
informed of activity and to complying with the FISC’s judgment. The
FISC, meanwhile, in these documents looks nothing like the rubber stamp
that it’s portrayed to be in countless caricatures. It looks, rather,
like a serious judicial institution of considerable energy.

To the extent that members of Congress agree with this analysis—and
many members of the intelligence committee do—the principal task in the
current environment is to defend the existing structures, publicly and
energetically, as both Feinstein and Chambliss have done. It is not to
race to correct imagined structural deficiencies in the system and
thereby to appear to be reforming what one actually supports—and thereby
contribute to the delegitimizing of those structures. To be sure, there
are reforms that would be valuable in the way of increasing
transparency, increasing accountability, codifying now-public standards,
and even tightening those standards. But to my mind, we must pursue
these reforms in the context of a defense of the basic oversight
structures themselves. And the defense of these mechanisms necessarily
involves a defense of some degree of limitations on transparency. In
other words, the challenge of transparency here is a really subtle one:
It is to inject transparency within the basic confines of an oversight
system that is actually designed to protect secret

TRUST THEM, THEY'RE FROM THE GOVERNMENT

He then looks hard at the Big Data collection issue -- the firehose of data, the strict rules for the use of only parts of this data, and the internal legal restraints.

And he comes down with the perspective of trusting a liberal democratic state under the rule of law:

The first is law. Unless you believe that the intelligence community is a
lawless enterprise that will not follow the rules, this puts a premium
on the substantive content of the law Congress writes to govern this
area. In other words, the reason it matters what the rules are is that
we assume that the law actually will constrain NSA.

And then he doesn't just leave it as blind and dumb trust in one's government -- which leads the Marcy Wheelers of the world to call you a Stasi lover and other twitterers to call you Obama bots or Sheeple or worst -- he specifies why you can trust the government -- because there are checks and balances and consequences:

It is really important to distinguish between the technical capacity to
do something and whether that thing is actually going to happen. The
D.C. police could easily raid my house today. They have the technical
capacity to do it. Yet I have near-total confidence that it will not
happen. The FBI could wiretap my phone. It certainly has the technical
capacity to do so, yet I have a near-total confidence that it will not
happen. The reason for my confidence is two-fold: the substantive law
would not support either action, and there are robust compliance
measures that mean that were lawless action were to take place, there
would be accountability at many levels and I would have a remedy.

Yet the EFF and ACLU gang keep squawking that everything is secret, we "can't know what is done in our name" blah blah. Well, if you have elected officials and they monitor this, you have to trust them to some extent and the notion that Congress "wasn't informed" has been pretty well debunked at this point. This isn't being Sheeple, it's acknowledging that division of labour is what you have in a modern society -- and that intelligence activity cannot be transparent in the maximum way the hackers want it.

WELL, WHO WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE CONTROL YOUR PRIVACY?

And really, Wittes finally cuts it down to this proposition:

In the era of Big Data, the compliance regime is a big part of the
whole ballgame. If you believe the compliance regime inadequate, after
all, the government already has the data. But one thing we have learned
an enormous amount about is the compliance procedures that NSA uses.
They are remarkable. They are detailed. They produce data streams that
are extremely telling—and, to my mind, deeply reassuring.

And here’s the rub: I believe that my liberty is more secure with NSA
collecting this material subject to these rules and this compliance
regime than it would be if NSA declined to do so.

Of course, Greenwald and the gang don't see it this way, and if it were up to them, this collection would be entirely shut-down, unless miraculously law-enforcement got data from some other technique that the hacker crowd is willing to approve (real-life trailing of suspects?) and then tasked a phone or Internet company -- with a warrant -- to look at specific records.

Here's how I see it even more starkly. We have a choice in whose hands and under what authorities the firehose of all communications are going to be, and how these communications are accessed. It can involve:

1. Governments, for better or worse, who possess the physical infrastructure and capacity to hold and tap the Internet and are under rules, laws and oversight internally and by Congress;

2. Private companies, that are directly interfacing with the public as they produce the content that affects privacy and who are not subject to outside oversight and often don't even have fair internal procedures;

3. Hackers who hacker data on a whim, at will, and themselves remain secret, and demand maximum encryption -- and who are subject to absolutely no accountability.

So what's it going to be? Which one of these or which combination? Shouldn't it be obvious why I'm for Door No. 1 -- because that's the option that really does have public oversight, unlike the others?

We more or less have no. 1 with parts of no. 2 now, but no. 3 whacking away at both and upsetting the status quo.

But...It's not like you get a *fourth* choice where companies, heeding the most extreme advice of extreme hackers, seal off your privacy from themselves (not when they need it for marketing and management of their platforms!), and don't ever enable government access in any way at any level (but...do they want to be good law-abiding corporate citizens or not?).

And it's not like you would get hackers content with leaving it at that, either.

THE HACKERS OFTEN DO RUN THINGS

Yet no company and no government is going to accept a regime where hackers run things -- in fact, what we have now is a regime where hackers run things and that's precisely the problem. Their damage is rampant and they are ubiquitous. Hackers are fighting hard to bring their Autonomous Unicorn Realm into being, but they are constrained not only by internal fighting or power struggles but capacity.

Corporations are basically the ones with the largest capacity now (Google). And for now, they are forced to be constrained by governments that take them to court (like the US is now on their grab of wi-fi streams which none of the Greenwalds and Appelbaums are complaining about at all, and aren't welcoming the court-case on this at all.)

ARE AMERICAN COMPANIES HURT BY SNOWDEN?

There's been a constant tech press refrain that Snowden's revelations are going to "hurt American business" -- Europeans, especially Germans are going to dump American services because their data "isn't safe". While there are German Internet/email companies running "made in Germany" sort of campaigns now, and Russia has really run with this concept big-time (and held meetings with Google about it as a result), I haven't heard of some big, huge dent in the services' business.

The claim that Facebook is "dying" is a special, recurring geek myth that has to do with software autocracy, coder culture and such, "progressive" politics that hate what Zuckerberg's lobbying arm is doing now -- and all this leads to the placing negative stories based on skewed spinning of the Pew and other polls about usage - and deserves a special post. Unfortunately, Socialbakers stopped publishing country data on usage so it's hard to know if there is a "Snowden drop" yet -- but note that even in April before Snowden's revelation, the Guardian was claiming a drop.

And again -- regarding privacy, these companies are on the run anyway, and were before Snowden. In fact, long before Snowden, the EU privacy commissioners were constantly trying to sue Google or deal with Google politically. And some of that is bearing fruit now.

I wonder if there is serious damage to FB or Google or Twitter that rather than fend off attacks in court or "manage perceptions" in governments, they might finally turn around and say, "Hey, we need to get Snowden -- and Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum."

Don't think their corporate board rooms don't have people discussing this, and don't have corporate security people who are examining this. These companies have CONSIDERABLE monitoring capacity of course -- if they want, they can pull Appelbaum's, etc. Google searches and such and use their VAST sleuthing and networking skills -- they are everywhere, all over the world, doing everything and knowing everybody -- to find out what's really up.

My bet is that if they come to suspect that this hack is either a sectarian hysterical hype by the extremists at the Chaos Computer Club, who aren't co-terminous with Google executives although they overlap with Google engineers OR that it is a sinister Russian active measures exploiting WikiLeaks wittingly or unwittingly, they will fight back in their own inimitable way -- planting stories in the tech press which they are masters at doing, planting Youtubes which they are masters at doing, planting Twitter hashtags which they are masters at doing.

If they think Snowden has taken food off their table, they will fight back harder than any government and eventually they will target him and the rest of the G9 crew -- unless of course they admire and love him - which I suspect some do - because ultimately he is about freeing the Internet for more use and more ad clicks and less resistance from firewalls.

I think in fact they will find that the privacy movement is not one that serves their interest, howver, even if they try to play the game of saying they will now provide more of it for their customers, because privacy mitigates against their ability to scrape and tape info for their purposes, too. They can go through somewhat faint motions as they are doing now of tasking the government to have "transparency" on their information requests, but they may find that doing this, and even finding there are only 37,000 of them out of gadzillions of transactions will undermine rather than bolster public confidence.

Proposition 35, which passed with 81 percent of the vote Tuesday, would require that anyone who is a registered sex offender — including people with misdemeanor offenses such as indecent exposure and whose offenses were not related to activity on the internet — would have to turn over to law enforcement a list of all identifiers they use online as well as a list of service providers they use.

The Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act would force sex offenders to fork over to law enforcement their e-mail addresses, user and screen names, or any other identifier they used for instant messaging, for social networking sites or at online forums and in internet chat rooms.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed their suit (.pdf) on behalf of two registered sex offenders, say that although the measure is vaguely worded, in practice it likely means that registered sex offenders would have to provide user and screen names that they use for participation in online political discussion groups, forums about medical conditions, and even the comment sections of online newspapers and blogs.

This is dreadful, and you wonder how it happens.

It's not necessary, in the fight for free speech, to protect the ability of predators to go out and commit crimes again online.

Their aliases after all aren't being published to the public, but to police. If they have some legitimate chat on a health forum or a political forum, they can indeed use their aliases to maintain their privacy, but they can't do that AND not report them to police. They have to report them to the police, under this proposition -- which was submitted to a vote and passed.

That's because they are not trustworthy, being sex offenders. As I've discovered from past debates and as I've seen on line with journalists who take them on, there is nothing more tenacious, nasty and horrible than child pornography apologists -- and users and offenders -- in defending their "turf".

Why is this?

The other day I was having a chat with someone who also reflects on Anonymous and follows their antics and undertands the geek culture. We noted how often there seems to be a cross-over offense of use of child pornography or apologies for child pornography on the Internet among Anonymous and other hackers -- despite Anonymous much-ballyhooed fight against child abusers -- which I've noticed is actually a way to enable lots of anonymous people to go into child pornography discussion rooms under the guise of policing them, and also to discuss the subject to death under the guise of fighting it. Clever, that.

There is apparently the case of a well-known scholar who sides with the hacker culture who was fired for an inappropriate relationship with a minor -- a story that I cannot verify. The EFF position here and the positions taken like it in Second Life by the "ageplayers" are emblematic of this creepy side of geekdom, however.

I theorized that first, the hackers who make themselves binary thinkers and inhumane through constant coding and constant depersonalized Internet communication adopt a nihilist viewpoint whereby child molesting no longer seems like a crime -- because anything goes and there is no more crime online, there is only what morals "we decide," as John Perry Barlow explained to me in person, when I objected to the absence of the rule of law. So for me, first mechanization and adopting to robot routines, then piracy and persecution through outing other people's privacy, then eventually they move on to accepting child pornography as there is no law. That seemed to me to be the intellectual proposition, so to speak, something worthy of Dostoyevsky and Crime and Punishment.

But my interlocuter disagreed and said no, the people who are child predators and consumers of child pornography start out lawless like this, and then naturally get drawn to the free-for-all climate of the piracy, crypto-kid, Anonymous sort of geek culture on the Internet.

Whatever path it is, and it may be both, it's awful, and to be repudiated. I hope the judge eventually sees the light on this case.

08/10/2013

Barrett Browning is not going to get as speedy a trial as some had hoped. But not his lawyers, who are deliberately trying to delay and postpone, citing all kinds of things -- because among other things they can have most of the sentence then disappear in pre-trial time served.

Gosh, that sounds like some sort of evil suppression of free media, no? I mean, slamming journalists for doing their jobs, like Russia and the Central Asian regimes do, barring reporters from "divulging the secrecy of the investigation" pre-trial -- and thereby banning legitimate discussion of crimes or state claims of crimes.

But I'm not sure this is going to pass the sniff test as a First Amendment case and I don't see anybody rushing to make it into one.

That's because the lawyers and support committees are deliberately whipping up a media circus which really does then bring into question the ability of the trial to be impartial.

Brown's attorneys are scrambling to make it seem like their client and
they aren't the ones getting the story in the media, but that's pretty
threadbare.

The idea that you can be in pre-trial detention and get to whip up a media barrage in your defense by getting the hacker-enabling journos like Greenwald and non-journalist linguistic-professor propagagndists like Ludlow to make noise sort of obviates the whole point of jail, you know?

And jail is where Barrett Brown needs to be given the charges against him, which, of course are not yet proven in a court of law.

Is Barrett Brown a journalist because he started some drug-fueled paranoia-induced database of "facts" on security firms and made a lot of incoherent Youtubes? No, he's just a hacker who blogs a lot. Should bloggers, too, be protected for their journalism, in whatever form it takes?

No, not if it takes the form of linking to pages with stolen credit card numbers and bragging about it, threatening federal agents, obstructing justice -- oh, and hacking into other people's servers to "spill their secrets".

She gets much farther in the debunking of the WikiLeaks cult of
personality than many of her counterparts on the left in the United
States who are still mindlessly boosting it as part of some "national
conversation" blah blah that we all must be coerced into having by
destructive hackers...

But she repeats a number of these WikiLeaks memes that I think are
really for the birds -- and in fact, some more thoughtful "progressives"
in the US even get -- i.e. the notion that WikiLeaks "caused" or
"brought" about the Arab Spring. I find this arrant nonsense. Aside from
the fact that it discounts the very real analog acts of people like
Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set
himself on fire like an Arab Jan Palach, and all the demonstrators who
took such risks in really very analog ways, going to prison or being
killed, it just plain wildly exaggerates itself as some historical force
(as Marxists often do). You can attribute the Arab Spring to many
things -- I start with Kofi Annan's report on the failure of human
development in the Arab world -- which was devastating to the Arab
League which had put so much stake in having the UN cover its crimes in
the Israel/Palestine conflict. Then I got to the wheat shortage in
Russia -- or rather, the forest fires in Russia that caused the Kremlin
to decide to ban its exports to wheat -- which affected its subsidized
exports to Egypt. Then most people blame the US for subsidizing these
despotic regimes but also serving as the basis of the Internet
revolution facilitated by American IT companies that was used to spark
but not always sustain the revolutions.

I supported Assange before I ever met him. I knew of his work when he
was arrested on allegations of sexual assault in late 2010 and held in
solitary confinement and I decided to stand bail for him because I
believed that through WikiLeaks he was speaking truth to power and had
made many enemies. Although I had concerns about what was rumoured to be
a nonchalant attitude towards redactions in the documents he leaked, as
well as some doubts about the release of certain cables – for example,
the list of infrastructure sites vital to US national security – I felt
more passionately that democracy needs strong, free media.

Accountability and democratic choice, I deeply believe, are guaranteed
by rigorous scrutiny only. As Manning wrote, “without information you
cannot make informed decisions as a public”.

As editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Assange had created a transparency
mechanism to hold governments and corporations to account. I abhor lies
and WikiLeaks exposed the most dangerous lies of all – those told to us
by our elected governments. WikiLeaks exposed corruption, war crimes,
torture and cover-ups. It showed that we were lied to about the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan; that the US military had deliberately hidden
information about systematic torture and civilian casualties, which were
much higher than reported. It revealed that Bush and Obama had
sanctioned the mass handover of Iraqi prisoners of war from US troops to
the Iraqi authorities, knowing they would be tortured.

There is so much here that needs refutation -- and I just don't have the time. No, not refutation that the American did bad things like start wars or turn people over for torture. But refutation that it took WikiLeaks for us to find that out, or that WikiLeaks was somehow instrumental in the American people's understanding of these wars.

But
let's start with "Collateral Murder" -- which is not murder, and
doesn't prove murder or intent in a tragic incident in which American
soldiers who had spent a day skirmishing with insurgents wind up killing
civilians because they think they are an armed group -- and indeed some
of them are carrying weapons, even though some are journalists carrying camera tripods.

This
is a piece of blatant, tendentious propaganda as I've explained in the
debate with Jacob Appelbaum. It's just not credible. Neither Reuters or
any major human rights groups has called it murder much less called it a
"war crime," even if they have called for an investigation of the
tragedy or have called it "excessive use of force".

I'm not aware of any systematic and credible, independent, non
"progressive" study of the war materials in WikiLeaks -- in fact, a lot
of it has been ignored even by anti-war boosters, because it's raw
material without context and without analysis.

Khan claims glibly -- without ever having done any of this close textual
analysis herself to my knowledge -- that this trove of material somehow
constitutes proof of American war crimes, American torture, etc.

Well, if this is the case -- once again, nobody needed WikiLeaks to supply this. And it is indeed deliberately exaggerated -- and needs much more honest handling of this material than they've given it.

A
real problem with the intelligentsia in Europe -- and particularly in
England, Germany, France and the Netherlands -- is that they see the US
in a caricature form, largely from TV serials or sensational news, and
imagine it's a country of rabid Confederate SUV drivers fatly shopping
at Wal-mart as they clutch their guns in bitterness.

As I explained to Amnesty back when they put out that ridiculous claim
that American prisoners were "like the GULAG," the US has a huge
industry of people actively -- ferociously -- fighting Guantanamo and
every conceivable prison abuse real or potential or imagined -- and with
great success, quite frankly, in getting cases reversed and laws
changed. If Guantanamo isn't closed, AI should look to its own fired
gender advisor and the Cageprisoners scandal first before imagining that
no one cases about stopping torture in America in Guantanamo.

There's
this sense in Khan's rant that America "needs" this "prying open" of
its government so that people can "see what's being done in their name"
(the WikiLeaks slogan) -- but of course, long before any of WikiLeaks or
Assange or Manning, lawyers and human rights activists were busy
exposing things like torture at Abu Ghraib -- that's how the world knows about it.
American civil society and independent media are intact, you know.

The idea that we can accept as a "democracy-builder" this narcissistic brute that she herself exposes as a fraud is pretty droll.

You
hardly need Manning telling you that you need information to make
"informed decisions" when you have a long history of people like Anthony
Lewis or Floyd Abrams or even Daniel Ellsberg, who himself never
understands why he really is worlds apart from the snivelling Manning.

And...the
"most dangerous lies of all" are those "told by our elected
governments"? Really, Jemima? More dangerous that the lies told by
unelected governments like Iran, or only corruptly-elected governments
like Russia? Truly? The truth can out in a democratic society with a
free media and free institutions like Congress and the judiciary. It
can't do that in Russia. And the implications for society of having
"democracy" achieved by coercion and secretive hacking with those who
allied themselves with the Kremlin are pretty repulsive.

I suspect we are seeing the WikiLeaks adventure end as it began -- in the Kremlin agitprop department.

Accordingly, a lot more critial review of WikiLeaks "revelations" is in order -- it
is not a good idea that was badly executed, any more than communism is.